HTC Desire :: Unreliable Synch / Wrong Names On Texts

I have had my HTC Desire for 3 or 4 weeks now and I am determined to like it. I'm stuck with it for 24 months so I have to!! However, synching with my outlook contacts and calendar seems to be a very hit and miss affair. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. I am running Vista 32 bit on a Vaio laptop with outlook 2003 (I hope to move to google apps soon but it feels like a big job to do it so i need enough time to work it all out). I downloaded HTC synch from the web but that didn't work so I used the version on my phone and that seemed to work better! I am using HTC Sync, version: 2.0.28. I always start HTC Synch first and then connect the phone. i select the synch option on the phone, but it usually fails to connect at that point. If I then a wait a little, and if I am lucky, it seems to connect itself and the Application installer icon pops up on the HTC Synch screen. then i can try again to synch. And sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. This is a lot of messing about - i wish it would just work - is there anything i can do? Also, when i receive texts from kid's school or my bank, the phone seems to assign random names from my contacts list. How weird is that? Any ideas for a cure? I have also found that it can be extremely slow to load videos on youtube. at the weekend i was with someone who had a iphone on the same network in the same place and they had no problem. Grrrrr!! often when it fianlly gets the video and starts to play it it stops halfway through - data is obviously not coming through quickly enough. Is there anything i can do to help this. Finally I am very disappointed that it can't make phone calls as well as my old Nokia 6230. same place, same network, perfect on the old phone, dropping out and bad reception on the HTC. The old phone worked fine in the local supermarket, The HTC simply says NO NETWORK. Have i got a bad phone or is this typical?